ABSTRACT
The urban historian Robert Fishman has argued that at the origin of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British process of suburbanization, precursor of the same phenomenon in the United States, lies the emergence of the modern idea that “social distinctions require physical segregation”.1
This idea is now central to most forms of contemporary urban development.2
It is now generally assumed that in most modern, industrial societies, location in physical space has become an indicator of location in social space.3 Your social status is indicated by where you live, which becomes a reflection of your wealth rather than your ethnicity or occupation. With no stable consumption patterns to distinguish people, space has become more critical than before as an indicator of social standing. The loss or absence of interclass behavioral codes has also encouraged people to pursue daily interaction only with those with whom they share comparable levels of income, education, and culture, i.e., social power. As indicated before, the sheer size of modern urban populations also works against the stabilizing force of familiarity, the possibility that your social status is not in doubt because everyone knows who you are. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, who famously named and analyzed the “rites of passage”, compared human societies to a “house divided into rooms and corridors”.4 For individuals, the assumption of new roles, identities, and statuses was like moving from one room of the house to another, and rituals and ceremonies typically marked this passage. Modern societies in the West must then be classified among those where this spatial metaphor becomes quite literal. In cities, status is now linked to spatial location, and social transitions tend to involve moving trucks.
